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Lessons from Blacksburg

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By Armin Rosen
PUBLISHED APRIL 19, 2007

It unfolded like a terrifying set-piece, and each new item of information seemed more trite and intuitive than the next: the killer had been a student. He had been a social outcast, homicidally contemptuous of the society that he felt had cast him out. The guns used had been purchased legally. And there had been warning signs that now seem to have stopped tantalizingly short of portending the coming carnage. "When this is all said and done," the online magazine Slate cited one blogger as writing a few hours after the shooting, "we will likely have an unhappy young person who probably had an unhealthy obsession with guns, violence, gory video games, and over the top blood-fest movies"-which means that, even in its horrifying randomness, the Virginia Tech shooting takes on a grim aspect of predictability.

But what should this predictability teach us? Since noted poet and Virginia Tech English professor Lucinda Roy found Cho Seung-Hui unstable enough to justify contacting campus counseling services over 18 months prior to the attack, it could be argued that universities and society in general should be more aggressive in administering psychological help to those who obviously need it. We Americans are great believers in therapy: with nearly one in four adults seeking professional help and Adderall alone bringing in over a quarter-billion dollars in annual revenue, we, arguably, have put more faith in the redemptive powers of the clinical or prescriptive than any other society on earth. But it would be a mistake to let this past week&#39;s events reinforce this notion that normalcy can be clinically prescribed, or, as some have recommended, clinically imposed. As author Deepak Chopra appropriately noted in an interview with CNN, psychologist Abraham Maslow maintains that love and belonging are as fundamental to human existence as food and shelter. And the professional concern of a therapist for her patient can&#39;t fill basic emotional or social voids any better than social relationships alone can cure mental illness.

Does this teach us that our society predisposes people to committing horrific killing sprees? I, for one, appreciate a certain irony in the fact that this event has ultimately strengthened the very community from which Cho felt so excluded. However, it is patently insensitive to blame the Virginia Tech community for excluding someone who was so invisible to it. And, by all accounts, Cho was not just invisible to those around him, but invisible to himself as well: by shaving off his weapons&#39; serial numbers, carrying no identification, and committing suicide in a way that would obscure his most individual physical feature-his face-he argued against his own humanity and individuality. So if we are to blame the community as a whole for its exclusivity, then it would be disingenuous because we too fail to reach out to those in potential danger of lapsing into a permanent state of social and personal non-existence.

But is the existence of such people alone enough to teach us that our society is somehow structured to produce killing sprees like the one at Virginia Tech? In his seminal work, Suicide (1897), sociologist Emile Durkheim poses a similar question, and proceeds to argue that the social and historical consistency of the suicide rate proves the act to be an unalterable "social fact," built into the social structure. It&#39;s terrifying to think of the destructive confluence of mental instability, exclusion and a propensity for violence as one such "social fact." But reactions to the massacre suggest that that&#39;s exactly how a lot of people feel: for instance, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert blamed a "staggering amount of murders" on "feelings of inadequacy, psychosexual turmoil and the easy availability of guns." According to Herbert, the only item over which we, as a society, have conscious control is the last.

Yet, if we learn one thing from the Virginia Tech massacre, it should be the importance of using what sliver of control we do have. We can encourage people like Cho to seek the help they desperately need without expecting that help to be a cure-all. We can reach out to the socially alienated, and make an effort to acknowledge those people who we would usually ignore. We can also limit the availability of handguns. Most importantly, we can insist that this past Monday&#39;s event were not structural, and avoid lapsing into the kind of cynicism that might have made such an event possible in the first place.

Scores of Facebook groups have a name derived from the phrase "Today, we are all Hokies." The phrase was meant as a show of solidarity with a university suffering in ways none of us can imagine. But as long as we keep internalizing, tolerating, or even ignoring the factors that led to Monday&#39;s attack it, also functions as a cynical truth: we are all vulnerable. And in that respect, we are all Hokies.

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Ire and Vice: The Dead

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May 22, 2007
By Darren Franich

Suicide is so much less embarrassing than homicide. Can you imagine the shitstorm maelstrom that would engulf our pretty campus if someone shot five people? Shot them so their blood splattered across the tables of Stern dining hall. Or their blood covered the pull-out desks in the chem building. Or their blood filled the fountains until the water sprayed dark bitter red. Five Stanford students dead.

Hell, it doesn&#39;t have to be five. Make it three. Make it one. Think of the black cloud that would descend on our lives. Our own little Virginia Tech. The blood, damn it, the fucking blood! Pouring out of open wounds. Choked out of lungs that will never breathe again. On our campus. On our hands. Flowing out of pale bodies until the heart just stops pumping, tired, empty.

Fortunately, people don&#39;t kill other people at Stanford. They just kill themselves. No one ever talks about the suicides, but everyone talks about how no one ever talks about the suicides. "Can you believe," we shake our heads, "four suicides at Stanford in one year, and nobody notices, nobody cares."

Someone says, "I heard there were five."

"That&#39;s what I&#39;m talking about."

Stanford is killing people. We shouldn&#39;t hold that against Stanford. There is so much joy here. There are thousands of students who live happy lives of quiet desperation, for whom suicide is never more than a passing fancy, the dream of an eternal vacation from one&#39;s own brain.

But for a school that prides itself on its happiest-place-on-earth reputation, one suicide is a misfortune. Five is just awkward. To a high school senior, Stanford is the anti-Cornell: happy people living happy lives under the happy, happy sun. And now there is a suicide epidemic. Intelligent young people — who have worked hard their whole lives to get here, who have so much to look forward to — are eliminating themselves from the humanity continuum. Asphyxiation. It&#39;s not a good way to go.

These people would have been great. Leaders of the world. And now they are memories tinged in eternal sadness. Take them off of Facebook. Cross them off your Christmas list. Destiny has clipped whatever wings they might have grown.

Some people have expressed distaste for the University&#39;s handling of the suicides. A couple weeks ago, Hennessy wrote a letter to the editor. (In case you missed it, Boardman emailed you a link a few days later.) Half of the letter was about Virginia Tech. That event was a tragedy beyond all reckoning. But it has nothing to do with Stanford. Campus security is not the issue we should be debating. I saw eight police cars in twenty minutes last Saturday, and witnessed one brave officer fearlessly charging a dangerous minor for drinking quietly in public. A libertarian might argue that the overregulation on this campus is the problem. I will just point out that no one is killing us except ourselves.

They&#39;re trying they&#39;re best, though, like bumbling parents desperately devoted to children they will never understand. They designed a cute Campus Climate Questionnaire with a stress tree and a stress quilt. They had a mental health fun day in White Plaza, with free massages. Everywhere you look there&#39;s a pamphlet for the Bridge. It&#39;s all utterly useless, but they&#39;re trying. It&#39;s the thought that counts, even if they appear to think we&#39;re in second grade.

Our school&#39;s not to blame. It&#39;s us. It&#39;s who we are. It&#39;s the curse of our overworked generation. If you&#39;re here, then odds are you&#39;ve spent the better half of your life attaining perfection. Extracurriculars, AP tests, trophies, student government, student newspapers, singing, dancing, studying, sleeping only when your body could hold out no longer against the dark unconsciousness. I always assumed that sort of life was over with high school; that once you got to college things slowed down. For most people, college is even more intense than high school: more work, more coffee. Our parents used science to make us the perfect worker bee study bots — but you can&#39;t just turn that off. If anything, you become even more type-A with age. We want it all. We binge on work, we binge on play, we binge.

But it&#39;s never enough. We get to Stanford, which is supposed to be the fulfillment of all our dreams, and it isn&#39;t enough. We need a good med school, a good law school, a great job, the love and respect of our peers and our betters. My shrink described to me how kids like us — perfectionists, go-getters, workaholics — live our lives walking up an eternal slope without ever turning back. We never see how high we&#39;ve come, we only see how much higher we still have to go. And we get depressed because there is no plateau; the mountain just gets steeper.

It doesn&#39;t help that the whole world is going to shit. Or rather, that we are more aware than any previous generation of how shitty the world has always been. It calls to mind something AJ said a couple of weeks ago on "The Sopranos." How can you not be depressed? How can any sane person approach the world with anything less than horror and distaste and loathing? When AJ attempted suicide on the most recent episode, I found myself begging the Lord to spare him — as if he carried the fate of us all on his shoulders, as if whatever happened to him was going to happen to us eventually.

The pessimism is everywhere. The &#39;90s are seven years gone. Any dream of paradise on earth is gone with them. The planes flew into the towers. And that didn&#39;t even matter. Can you imagine? 9/11 doesn&#39;t even matter. It&#39;s a blip in the radar. People were suffering before; people are still suffering. Our world is broken, dying. We killed it. Global warming is God&#39;s next flood. Wipe the slate clean. Maybe the cockroaches will do better.

Or so we think, sometimes, when the sunshine feels cold, when death feels so close. You know what? There&#39;s a way out. And you don&#39;t need CAPS or the Bridge or the Office of Religious Life. You have to fail, and you have to want to fail. Skip a class, or miss a meeting. Whatever you think you have to do, do the exact opposite. Try to become everything you&#39;re afraid of becoming: fat, stupid, alone. Admit weakness. Find someone who makes you happy and tell them everything that makes you hurt. Especially the stupid shit. Because suicide, in the end, is stupid. Living is the appropriate response to life. We owe it to our honored dead to learn from their mistakes. We owe it to them to live every day like it&#39;s the start of forever. And we owe it to them to try to change our life if our life isn&#39;t working for us.

Darren Franich will be celebrating his 21st and 22nd birthdays on Friday and insists that his devoted underage fan base come and get illegally plastered. Email him at dfranich@stanford.edu.

<b>Comments on this article:</b>

<b> Cat</b> - 5/22/07
Wow, great piece!
Just finished the Campus Climate Questionaire and found it hokey.

<b> L </b> - 5/22/07
Cute rhetoric but you aren&#39;t taking the whole situation into account. It isn&#39;t necessarily Stanford or our parents or our type-A personalities that are, as you say so many times, killing us -- there are innumerable nuances to these situations, including unglamorous non-Stanford-related roots like clinical depression.

Also, for some crazy reason I find myself unable to trust the guy who begs god to spare AJ Soprano to genuinely have all of our best interests at heart...

<b> J </b> - 5/22/07
Darren, if you truly want to help then go out and fail, fail big, and write a column about it. Help show how to redefine success. Otherwise this really is rhetoric, as empty as the trees and quilts in the campus questionnaire.

<b> Eric </b> - 5/22/07
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and the headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

<b>Jason Kerwin </b> - 5/22/07
This is exceptional writing. I&#39;ve learned to expect far less from the Daily.

L is right about the clinical depression angle. It&#39;s very common here, as on many college campuses. Most researchers think there is a direct link between depression and intelligence/creativity, so the high rates of depression here are no accident.

<b> David </b> - 5/22/07

Darren&#39;s articles shouldn&#39;t have blogs after them because they just sap the energy out of what I always find to be exceptionally powerful and interesting writing. Next time I finish reading one of Darren&#39;s articles and I see that dreaded "comments on this article:" line, I&#39;ll stop, close my computer, think of the craziest and trite shit that I can to post, open my computer again, and sure enough, I&#39;ll find my work already done for me.

<b> s </b>- 5/23/07

Just a quick note - The Bridge did not have anything to do with the corny Campus Climate survey.

<b> I wanted to kill myself 2 </b>- 5/23/07
And it&#39;s not because of myself, I would have if I were able to do such thing. But it&#39;s because the way Stanford treats me every day (and especially the incompetence of student housing). So, since we&#39;re paying so much for health insurance anyway, they should include eutanasia for students. That way they wouldn&#39;t have to deal with usbickering after getting so much abuse from this university.

<b>Nicole D </b>- 5/23/07
I think it&#39;s really easy to blame our parents or our high schools or our societies for making us into the "perfectionists, go-getters" and "workaholics" you seem to think everyone at Stanford is. It is my hope that students here are smart enough to transcend that bullshit and to realize for themselves that perpetually jumping through hoops will never yield lasting satisfaction. Instead of blindly climbing that slope your therapist so poetically described, we all need to completely reevaluate what we&#39;ve been programmed by the afforementioned forces to think is important. We all need to ask ourselves whether the values we use to structure our lives are truly ours or not, whether they make us happy or not, whether the standards of achievment we had in high school are the ones we want cling to all our lives. It&#39;s a really uncomfortable thing to do, but it only this sort of continuous self-evaluation that can ensure that we&#39;re living the life we really want by standards we set for ourselves.

This is where I think therapy comes in. I&#39;m a huge therapy enthusiast. If I were president, i would mandate free therapy for everyone. My parents are both psychotherapists. Fuck, all my parents friends are therapists (I&#39;m from Brooklyn, NY, okay)! I, myself, saw a therapist for a little over a year before I left for college when my boyfriend became clinically depressed and suicidal. I don&#39;t think therapy is a miracle cure, but it was certainly one of the best thing I&#39;ve ever done. Not only did she help me deal with the stress of being in a relationship with someone who was depressed, but she also helped me rationally approach so many issues I had never even realized affected me so profoundly. I don&#39;t know if there&#39;s a stigma about seeking out mental help here at Stanford because, quite frankly, I&#39;ve never really heard the subject discussed among students. I come from a family in which the offer to talk to a mental health professional about whatever I wanted has always been on the table, and I&#39;m a firm believer that the majority of the American population needs to change its attitude towards mental health. I think it&#39;s important for people to approach their mental health in the same way they approach their physical health. You go for routine check-ups to make sure your body is working smoothly and get even small ailments checked out as a precautionary measure. People need to realize that chatting with a mental health professional regularly is not a diagnosis of insanity, but a normal and wonderful way to begin to straigten out the jumble of things that is in most of our heads. People need to understand that any issue, not matter how seemingly insignificant, is a legitimate reason to talk to someone. I say, if you can afford a private therapist, take advantage. If not, try out the Bridge Center or CAPS, Vaden&#39;s Counseling and Psychological Services. It&#39;s easy to demonize Stanford, or society, or the College Board and blame them for all of our problems. Ultimately, though, we are just as responsible for our own mental health as we are for our own lives.

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Op-Ed: An open letter to President Hennessy

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May 14, 2007
By Lisette Rimer

Dear Dr. Hennessy,

Thank you for your op-ed piece May 4th on preventing future tragedies such as Virginia Tech. It was forwarded to me byone of your students who suffered the loss of a friend, my son Patrick Wood. Patrick graduated from Stanford in 2005 with distinction in math. He loved the school, had many friends there, and was even treated for depression there. In January before he graduated, he was hospitalized for, as he explained to me, "having thoughts of suicide." He was committed to the Stanford hospital for five days, but proclaimed that he was OK, mostly bored, and didn&#39;t belong there. The psychiatrist in charge at the hospital agreed that Pat was OK and should be permitted to return to school as long as he continued therapy. He saw a therapist and a psychiatrist on campus and renewed his medication. His mood was up and down, but he continued an active social life and good communication with us. He was excited about an internship at Siemens in Berlin, Germany, which he began after graduation. He had applied for the internship through the Stanford Center in Berlin. He suspended his therapy for the summer with plans to return in September for the computer science co-term program, but he loved Berlin too much to leave just yet. Another friend from Stanford was arriving to work in the American Embassy there, and so Patrick obtained a leave of absence and continued to work at Siemens through the fall.

All the while, he made many friends, spoke and wrote fluent German, went to concerts with colleagues at Siemens, and maintained close contact with the Stanford Center. He could often be heard playing the piano there just as he had done at Haus Mitt. He wrote about a "mini-depression" before he came home to Connecticut for Christmas vacation. We thought a medication refill would be the answer. His twin sister and older brother were home, along with cousins, aunts, and uncles. It was the usual busy but fun time. Pat later told friends it was "relaxing" and that it was good to get away from the city for a while. On December 27th, he went to New York City to see another good friend from Stanford. He returned to Berlin on the 28th. In January he wrote about a "mini-breakdown." We had many emails. I called, but could not contact him by telephone. His last email to me was on January 26th. Humboldt University had requested additional information on his application as a grad student there. He took it as rejection, told me he might be returning to Stanford, and asked me to wish him luck. He answered no more emails after that. He saw friends on the weekend of the 28th and 29th. He did not return phone calls after Tuesday the 31st. His friend, who worked at the American Embassy and who lived a block away, became worried. He called and went to Pat&#39;s apartment several times the following weekend. He called the Stanford Center on Monday morning. They called the police to break into the apartment. By that evening, the police found Pat. He had died of carbon monoxide poisoning on Tuesday, January 31st.

Patrick was one of many graduates that June. He was one of many more who were going on to graduate school. The school cannot be responsible for every student on campus or every new graduate. I am under no illusions about who was responsible for his treatment and for what he did. It was Patrick alone who decided to stay in Germany, who decided to suspend treatment, and ultimately who decided that suicide would relieve his depression. I have tried to retrace his steps continuously in my mind ever since we were notified on February 6, 2006. On that day, his friend and others from the Stanford Center identified him. They called a Stanford residential housing director in Palo Alto, and he called us. Both the Stanford School in Berlin and Palo Alto had memorial services for him in February and March of last year. As you can see, the school was very much involved in both the life and in the death of my son.

Please do not mistake my comments for blame. Maybe no one could have prevented his loss, but I have learned that it is the very nature of his disease, and of Cho&#39;s at Virginia Tech, that should cause us to be hyper-vigilant. Students who are depressed, even brilliant and loving students like Pat, cannot function reliably because the source of their decision-making process is under attack. They are making flawed decisions because the very same mechanism used to make these decisions is malfunctioning. There is an anatomical difference between a healthy brain and a depressed brain. It is a detectable, visible difference, and yet it is only a part of the brain, for many decisions appear "normal." It is those normalities which lulled me into thinking that Pat would get help, that he would take care of himself, that he would certainly see how magnificent he was, that he had just graduated from Stanford with a 3.9 average and a major in math, that his friends loved him, that he had had the best childhood we could provide, that he had the brightest future of anyone. How could he not be happy? The answer is because depression does not operate on the same assumptions.

I have had to change my own notions of well-being because they failed Pat. He did not get help in Germany because he could not. The decisions he needed to make were not possible with the oppression and pain he was feeling. Although he was physically able to get to a doctor or call a therapist, just as he had done at Stanford, those functions needed motivation, and it was his motivation which had been destroyed. All the drive, the talent, the brilliance that had won him a full scholarship to Pomfret School, that had gotten him perfect SAT&#39;s, that had made him a valedictorian, that had made him a merit scholar, that had gotten him into Stanford, that won him a scholarship there, that had gotten him into the Krupp Internship program in Germany and then into Siemens—all the motivation he needed to achieve academic and social success was no match for this disease. He had sought treatment, and it had not worked, so he turned inward until he isolated his thoughts, his wants, and his pain, until he was feeling nothing but the sense of control which suicide brings.

I think your comments about psychological services are a welcome response. Pat&#39;s life was saved the first time he had major depression and was hospitalized by one of the counselors on campus, and I am deeply grateful. But I would hope, in the wake of Pat&#39;s agonizing loss and the frightening possibility of another Virginia Tech, that we come away with a few additional realizations. I have spent every day trying to do the same thing.

Mainly I hope that we understand that suicide victims are not insane. They function as well as they need to function. Almost everything about Pat was normal on the outside, even the relationship problem that preceded his death.

A truth I have learned too late is that we have to go to them. Pat needed someone to take him for help. Just because he did it the first time didn&#39;t mean he would do it again. As a matter of fact, there was less chance he would get help because he was weakened from the first depressive episode.

Because I have learned that depression is a terminal illness, I would hope that we could change the meaning of the term from a saddened state of mind, to the dangerous, insidious threat that it is. Most people who commit suicide have been depressed and have attempted it beforehand. As I think Patrick and the Virginia Tech incident made abundantly clear, we are ill-equipped to detect the severity of the disease and, therefore, the likelihood that these victims will complete a suicide. Anatomical detection would give us empirical data that we need to make a more accurate diagnosis, certainly more accurate than relying on a patient to rate himself on a depression scale as is now commonly the case. How many other diseases have to be self-diagnosed when a patient is least able?

And finally, a thought about treatment. A newspaper article last year pointed out that patients who were "cured" had to endure an average of four combinations of medication and therapy before finding one that succeeded. That means a great deal of trial and error at a time when any failure can be misconstrued as a reason for hopelessness and self-harm.

The implications for a university are complex. How much do you reach out, especially if the patient does not seek treatment? How do you know the severity of the depression? If we are relying on averagely intelligent people to pick up on the cues, we will never succeed. I know because I am one of those failures. I will hate myself forever for what I did not know about depression, for what I missed, for what I did not do for my son, but I also know that there are a lot of people saying the same thing about Cho. They are all blaming themselves, just as I am, because what passes for non-threatening behavior before suicide becomes pockmarked with danger signs afterward. I should have gone to Berlin. I should have called his friends. I should have done a lot of things and so should they who knew Cho. But we don&#39;t because we don&#39;t know they are necessary. We don&#39;t know they mean life or death, and we will not know until we have reliable detection.

Maybe the lesson that arises from Patrick, a favorite son of Stanford, is that students within Stanford programs should be better monitored no matter where they are. Whether they are in Palo Alto or Germany, follow-up and care (and this is most important) should be initiated by the school. Why? Because seriously depressed students are less likely to seek treatment. They consider themselves to be defective instead of legitimately sick because that&#39;s what depression does. It convinces them that there is no hope, and therefore no cure, but that is really depression talking. We have to break through that. We have to go to them, physically and mentally. If you go to the website for The American Federation for Suicide Prevention, you will see their advice for preventing suicide. The suicidal person cannot be expected to independently seek treatment. Somebody must take them.

If we can come away with any insight from Patrick and Cho, it is that follow-up was woefully lacking. I shudder to mention their names in the same sentence, but similar questions in their aftermaths compel me. Why didn&#39;t the school follow up on Pat&#39;s treatment in Germany even though he was in a Stanford internship program? The answer: Stanford was relying on Pat, and so was I. That cannot continue. When students become patients, the school must monitor them as long as they are connected to the school and wherever they are connected. Depressed students — even the best, like Pat — are simply not capable. Depressed students don&#39;t seek treatment because they are, not surprisingly, depressed. This is how depression kills, and in the process, it robs functioning until there is very little on which to rely. How do we know when that functioning is gone? We don&#39;t, and that is why it is up to us to know more. It is simply in our own best interest to detect and treat more actively and accurately. If I have come away with anything from the loss of my beautiful son it is this: Depression will kill anybody, but the burden is on usto know whom.

When Pat graduated in 2005, our whole family came to Stanford to wish him well: my husband and I from Connecticut, his older brother Colin and Colin&#39;s friend Julie from Washington State, his twin sister Libby from Vermont, and his grandparents Dr and Mrs. David Rimer from Los Angeles. We all came to congratulate him, and we were impressed with the beautiful ceremonies and meaningful events, but as I read your op-ed piece, the memory of meeting you at graduation stood out the most. You seemed like a caring person, even during the brief moments in which we had our photograph taken with you. We commented afterward how welcoming you and your wife had been, even though you were probably exhausted from shaking hands and posing for several hours. And now I write to ask you to bring that caring sensibility to the forefront of this issue. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students. It weakens parents&#39; confidence in the safety of their children on campus — parents, who, by the way, are already feeling excluded from the well-beings of their children because of confidentiality. We cannot see grades, get psychiatric records, get tuition bills directly, or intervene on students&#39; behalf. Everything is left up to the student, and, as we have seen with Patrick and Cho, we risk too much isolation.

Again, thank you for your interest in this issue, and thank you for promoting the psychological well-being of your students. I appreciate your focusing Stanford&#39;s public attention on these avoidable catastrophes. Patrick loved Stanford dearly. He was grateful for the services you did provide, and now, in his stead, we are grateful for your continuing efforts to protect our children.

I invite you to visit the memorial blog set up for Patrick by his Stanford friends at: http://patrickwood.blogspot.com/

Sincerely,

Lisette Rimer, Pat&#39;s mom
Pomfret Center, Connnecticut

<b>Comment on this article </b>

<b>Jon Bell</b> - 5/14/07

Ten day ago, a newly-admitted Freshman to Stanford went on yet another in a long-time-series of verbal abuse tirades against all the people who loved her; wished that they were all dead; that she hated all people, especially the rich--and that after Stanford she wanted a career in public relations. This person is now getting help--if she allows it. The University has been informed and has been fabulous.

<b> Ted Rudow III,MA </b>- 5/14/07
There is no reason to doubt the generous impulse behind the work of professional psychologists and social scientists. Most of the experts who guide the psychological society have good intentions.

But there may be reasons to doubt the competence of psychological helpers. A willingness to help does not guarantee a helpful result. Sometimes, as Thoreau wryly observed, the result is the opposite: "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."

The fact that psychologists are trying to help people often keeps us from asking whether they know how to help. We think it&#39;s bad manners to ask a man who is trying to help us if he really knows what he&#39;s doing. Of course, it&#39;s not just manners that prevent us from questioning psychology. It&#39;s also faith--the kind of faith that makes us believe that school teachers are doing what is best for our children. Or the kind of faith that tells you that the man in the clerical collar won&#39;t knock you down and steal your wallet. Just the same, we ought to be asking if psychologists really do know how to help. A good deal of research suggests that psychology is ineffective. And there is evidence pointing to the conclusion that psychology is actually harmful.
The first indication that psychology might be ineffective came in 1952 when Hans Eysenck of the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, discovered that neurotic people who do not receive therapy are as likely to recover as those who do. Psychotherapy, he found, was not any more effective than the simple passage of time. Additional studies by other researchers showed similar results. Then Dr. Eugene Levitt of the Indiana University School of Medicine found that disturbed children who were not treated recovered at the same rate as disturbed children who were. A further indication of the problem was revealed in the results of the extensive Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. The researchers found that uncounseled juvenile delinquents had a lower rate of further trouble than counseled ones. Other studies have shown that untrained lay people do as well as psychiatrists or clinical psychologists in treating patients. And the Rosenham studies indicated that mental hospital staff could not even tell normal people from genuinely disturbed ones. It is possible to go on with the list. It is quite a long one. But I hope this is sufficient to make the point that when psychologists rush in to help, they are not particularly successful.

<b> Ted Rudow III, Scientologist </b> - 5/14/07
Hey Ted, what exactly do you mean by, "psychology is actually harmful." That&#39;s a pretty nice blanket statement there. What you&#39;re meaning to say is, clinical psychology isn&#39;t always effective. The studies you list aren&#39;t indictments of psychology as a discipline, but specific methods of treatment. And none of them conclude, "Therefore, nobody should trust any psychologists, because of what we have tried to show." Seriously. Neurosis is not as widespread or specific as depression. Psychotherapy was always hackery and has little to do with modern-day depression treatment methods. Children&#39;s developmental processes are also moot in this discussion, be they abnormal or normal or whatnot. There are lots of studies showing a lot of things. You have to look at the whole body of the discipline and then inform yourself, not take the good and pointed studies relating to specific areas and discount the entire field.

<b>Why did you even give her space?</b> - 5/14/07
At some point, you just have to let go, lady. Get a grip. Stop projecting your woulda-coulda-shoulda parental replays to compensate for everything you didn&#39;t do, just to make yourself feel better and ignore what really did happen, most of which probably wouldn&#39;t have changed even with all the nannying you suggest.

<b> The Real BadgerNation </b> - 5/14/07
I agree...
and President Hannessy&#39;s fake smile and politically correct image are a clear sign that he cares. Same way G.W.&#39;s visits to Iraq and shaking of those people&#39;s hands, taking pictures and putting up a big baboon smile show that he also cares... about sending America&#39;s sons to die.

<b> Why is this letter in the Daily? </b>- 5/15/07
I agree with WDYEGHS - it&#39;s not very helpful to expect that CAPS could be able to &#39;follow-up&#39; on GRADUATES (who aren&#39;t eligible for their services any more, anyway...*ahem*), not to mention when they are 9 time zones away. Aside from the logistical (think personnel, funding, time and money spent tracking down Stanford students abroad) impossibility of this operation, how would that be funded? A third of Stanford undergrads go to CAPS at some time in their career here - keeping tabs on them to follow up is just not feasible with the way the service is set up at the moment.
Also, when would treatment end? If we were to promote a regime of following up on everybody after every psychological event had been resolved (something that closely resembles nannying...which health services can&#39;t do to people once they are of age without their consent) then it risks wasting the time of professionals who are already over-stretched and underpaid.
Finally, CAPS psychologists are not permitted to practice in Germany because they are licensed in the state of California. This guy&#39;s story is really tragic and it makes me really sad to have read this piece, but the answer, if there was one, would not have lay at Stanford no matter what obligations the mother wants to impose on the university.

<b>A more sympathetic response...</b> - 5/15/07
I think the three posts above me are not giving this well thought out article enough credit. I don&#39;t think she&#39;s advocating for a CAPS conselour to commute to Germany to make sure a graduate is doing ok, but some sort of follow up with the family or student to make sure they are getting some sort of help. Yes, a third of the student body may go to CAPS, but a much smaller fraction of the student body would require this follow up - - those who attempted suicide, were committed to the hospital against their will, etc.

While this article does suggest that Stanford should have remained involved in Pat&#39;s mental rehabilitation, I think the more important thing to take away is the author&#39;s useful view into the life of a mentally depressed student, and hopefully raises awareness of what our peers are going through - peers who you see next to you at dinner, walk by in white plaza, sit next to in class. while pat did not take his life while at stanford, many others have, and that fact needs a lot more attention from ALL OF US at stanford.

<b> Alyssa O&#39;Brien, PWR Instructor</b> - 5/16/07
As a Stanford instructor who knew Pat as a student years ago in PWR "Comic Rhetoric," I am deeply saddened to hear of his death. My heart goes out to Lisette and to all Pat&#39;s friends and family members. I still remember his gentle smile and quick wit. I hope anyone reading this realizes that suicide is a lonely and terrible solution -- there are people who will grieve and miss you with a deep ache. May 17 is the first annual Stanford Wellness day. Make a pact on this day to reach out to others and not give in or give up.

<b> Grateful</b> - 5/17/07
Thank you for sharing your painful and most personal experience. Your letter points out the difference between sadness and depression. Don&#39;t ever let go of your search for meaning and your determination to help others. Even if some miss the point (as evidenced by a few of the responses), to me and to others your words are precious. No man is an island. Thank you.

<b> Lisette Rimer</b> - 5/20/07

Dear Mr. Hohmann,

Thank you for being so generous with space in the Daily for Pat&#39;s picture and story. You gave prominence to an issue which has apparently troubled Stanford both on and off campus and, judging by the responses to Pat&#39;s story, drawn the full range of reaction. I found it interesting that I shared all views at different times in my life. Before Pat died, I agreed completely that schools cannot be traipsing all over the globe to protect students from themselves, that we could not make students live if they didn&#39;t want to. As a matter of fact, it is probably that kind of thinking that put me in this situation today.

Now that he&#39;s gone, I can only say from experience that the nature of the disease demands more from us. There is no better proof than Pat that depression is a terminal disease and that it operates outside the realm of logic. How do we know when a student has crossed that line? We don&#39;t, and so it stands to reason that we should take a conservative approach. As my doctor has told me many times since Pat&#39;s death, depression is like cancer, only worse in the sense that it attacks the very decision-making ability that students need to seek help. If you can&#39;t depend on the students, and the parents are three thousand miles away and getting the "I&#39;m OK" side of the story, who is left? It is only the professionals who know that depression does not "heal" after the first "episode" Even on medication, it takes longer to recover with each setback. Severely depressed patients do not "learn" from past failures. They get worse. They become more vulnerable. They are chronically ill, and even if they sought hospitalization once, as Pat did, they may be less likely to do it again because they will think they are beyond hope. My therapist tells me we can assume one thing about suicide: the person is in so much pain that death is a mandate. It&#39;s not like they went to a psychological shopping mall and unexplainably picked that choice. I have learned that it is a severe, agonizing, psychological torture, which constricts them internally but allows enough external composure to carry out their plan. Pick up any book on the subject and then think about it as I have done every day for fifteen months. If the school is sincere in improving its psychological services, follow-up after hospitalization is essential. Nobody else is equipped to do it, and the consequences may be fatal.

I am not removing blame from myself or from Pat, and I appreciate those who wrote and understood that. My letter is not about finding fault. It is simply stating a fact: the school must be proactive. The psychiatric services are excellent on campus. As a friend once told Pat, "Stanford is one of the best places to have a breakdown." Extending those services is simply a matter of a phone call, in Pat&#39;s case, to the Stanford Center in Berlin.

Most importantly, thank you to "A more sympathetic response," "Alyssa O&#39;Brien," and "Grateful." You knew Pat (Was it you, Mrs. O&#39;Brien, who nominated him for a writing prize for his paper on Juvenal? He was touched that you liked it.), and you knew how depression works. It&#39;s a thief, and it robs you blind. You cannot see your prospects unless professionals pry your eyes open. Thank you, Stanford, for the wonderful care you did give, and thank you again for continually working to improve those resources.

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Editorial: Address campus tragedies

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April 27, 2007
By Editorial Board

It is a tough line to walk: simultaneously respecting those affected by tragedy and reassuring the community in a time of crisis. This year has seen numerous examples of the administration&#39;s sincere efforts to negotiate that line with the handful of student suicides and most recently with its response to Stanford students on the Virginia Tech shootings.

But in each of those cases, we wish the administration would have spoken directly to all of us, or in instances in which they did, perhaps spoken sooner. An unknown number of classmates have taken their lives this year with no acknowledgement at all by the administration. Last week, it was more than 24 hours until we received an official response to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Undoubtedly, many factors go into the process for announcing a death in the community or responding to a tragedy at another school. In phone and email conversations, Director of University Communications Alan Acosta and Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman said that the issue of family privacy rights should not be overlooked.

While Acosta acknowledged that "there are a number of things you have to do right away" when dealing with tragedy, we don&#39;t understand entirely how the University&#39;s support network of Counseling and Psychological Services, the Bridge Peer Counseling Center or the Office of Religious Life assists students who are merely trying to determine if the rumor of their classmate&#39;s death is true or not. This year alone, rumors of numerous suicides plagued the student body, and in those times it was hard to find a student who really knew the truth of what was happening at Stanford.

Boardman&#39;s email to the student body the day after the Virginia Tech shooting was appreciated. Students needed to hear his support — we just wish it had come a little earlier. Those who live and work here expect Stanford to be there for them. The student body was never notified after some suicides. We do not expect a front-page story in the Stanford Report from the administration, but we do hope for a brief message to acknowledge a friend has passed away.

<b>Comments on this article:</b>

<b>Stupid editorial</b> - 4/27/07

What exactly is the editorial board asking for? The administration to send out mass e-mails detailing every aspect of a community member&#39;s death? The Stanford News Service already acknowledges (in a tasteful way!) Stanford community members who pass away. Maybe it was a slow news day today, but the Stanford Daily needs to realize that a student death is a rare occurrence, but if one does occur, the utmost sensitivity is required and respect for the families should be a top priority. This is obvious to everyone but those intrepid Daily writers? We need to remember that these are very private, delicate matters and families might not wish to broadcast all kinds of details to the world. That is perfectly understandable and, absent any danger to campus safety or any other issue that might require the immediate attention of the campus at large, there is no reason why the widespread dissemination of all details surrounding a particular death ought to be required for Stanford News Service. The following line from the editorial is particularly ridiculous: "This year alone, rumors of numerous suicides plagued the student body, and in those times it was hard to find a student who really knew the truth of what was happening at Stanford." So the paper is basing this whole editorial on rumors? What evidence does the paper have that a particular death was never acknowledged by the administration? Sometimes it seems like the Stanford Daily editorials are written hastily and with little regard for common sense.

<b>Re: Stupid editorial</b> - 4/27/07

I totally agree that this is a stupid editorial. The Stanford Daily was recently criticized for a long delay before they reported the death of Mo Morsette. And even when they did report it, it was not the top story of the day. It looks like, after some soul searching, the editorial board has decided that Stanford Administration is to blame, because the administration doesn&#39;t acknowledge student deaths quickly enough. After all, if someone doesn&#39;t tell the Stanford Daily that there&#39;s a death on campus, then how are they supposed to know? It&#39;s not like they&#39;re a NEWSPAPER with JOURNALISTS who are supposed to so FOOTWORK before they print stories.

<b>Daily is grasping at straws </b>- 4/27/07

The Daily&#39;s editorials have been going downhill for quite a while now. This one is perhaps one of their worst ever. What exactly is the benefit of criticizing the administration&#39;s response to the VT massacre?

<b>Brave Editorial</b> - 4/27/07

Stupid Editorial, it&#39;s your kind of overly sensitive, well-meaning but ultimately silly thinking that lets Bush get away with banning the media from soldier&#39;s funerals. I can understand respecting the family&#39;s privacy, but Mo Morsette was also a fellow member of this community - I would expect a complete investigation into what led him to take his own life, not in the interest of airing dirty laundry, but in the interest of helping other people who feel the same emotions that plagued him. This school is an intense psychological environment filled people whose incredible intelligence often dovetails with complete social maladjustment - it does not reflect well on Stanford to sweep things like this under the rug in the interest of "privacy."

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Sick Sad World: A lesson from Virginia Tech

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April 20, 2007
Opinion article
By Jackie Bernstein

It&#39;s time for a game of Funny/Not Funny. First: A joke overheard in the CoHo on Monday referencing the Virginia Tech massacre. Not Funny. No one laughed, and someone said, "Too soon, too soon." Next: An off-hand comment made at the gym on Wednesday, poking fun at the ethnicity of the Korean shooter responsible for the assault, Cho Seung-Hui. Funny? At least, I heard people laugh in response. "Oh, man... that&#39;s so wrong. Hahahahaha."

How soon is too soon to use a tragedy as fodder for comedy? "Homer loves Flanders," a Simpsons episode in season five, parodies Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower-sniper: Ned Flanders guns down multiple Homers from atop a bell tower. About 25 years after the massacre, FOX executives found the scene funny enough to air. How long will it take for South Park to run an episode satirizing the events at Virginia Tech?

I think that the amount of time it takes for someone to find humor in tragedy is directly related to his connection to the incident. It is unlikely that the man who sold Sueng-Hui his gun will ever find anything humorous about the shooting. The student in the CoHo who made his joke last Monday probably doesn&#39;t know anyone at Virginia Tech. I doubt that he feels any kind of personal connection to the event.

However, we as Stanford students are actually deeply connected to the Virginia Tech massacre. Seung-Hui exploded at Virginia Tech. Maurice "Mo" Morsette imploded at Stanford. Both students&#39; lives ended in tragedy.

Maurice Moisette&#39;s suicide is one of at least three reported at Stanford this academic year. Ranked in 2005 by The Princeton Review as the university with the "Happiest Students Overall" in the country, Stanford doesn&#39;t seem to be living up to its reputation any longer.

The Virginia Tech tragedy will undoubtedly lead the Stanford administration and various support groups on campus to reexamine how issues of mental health are handled on campus. This response seems to deal with only part of a greater problem.

No matter how many aggressive programs a school funds, no matter how many 24-hour hotlines they provide or psychologists they hire, nothing can change without a change in the student culture itself.

Unfortunately, the type of student elite universities admit is not going to change anytime soon. We are a nation obsessed with getting into college. And the most obsessed end up here. As a result, we are a campus full of top-heavy people. We are world-class debaters, writers and chemists, fully actualizing our intellectual potential. But these skills have come at the loss of developing more basic skills. By the end of winter quarter of my freshman year, 40 percent of my all-frosh dorm had never been kissed. Throwing these types of kids into the collegiate world is bound to result in extreme feelings of alienation, confusion and anger. College is a place where many get their first taste of freedom, but learning how to handle independence isn&#39;t part of any AP Physics textbook.

I know that this article goes to print during Admit Weekend, and, as such, I was reluctant to write this week about our collective failings as members of the academic world. As a tour guide who couldn&#39;t imagine having gone anywhere else (and who enthusiastically tells this to hoards of high school juniors on a regular basis), I want to make sure that I am very clear: I have had a remarkable experience at Stanford, and I know that I made the right choice in coming here. Quite a few of my friends feel the same way. The problems of socially handicapped hyper-achievers are not unique to a few schools. Rather, this situation is endemic across the country.

I decided to write this article after I watched a mother and her ProFro daughter walk through the activities fair yesterday. The daughter was texting on her cell phone, and her mom kept on taking papers from the student tables, asking the students working the booths a slew of questions: "How many hours a week do you volunteer? How many other activities do you do? Do you put your activities on your resume? How many activities should my daughter do?" The mother was so involved in her daughter&#39;s life that I wondered if she had opened her daughter&#39;s acceptance letter for her.

My hope is that the mother I overheard reads this week&#39;s column. I hope that she realizes that her daughter is probably exhausted from pushing herself through four incredibly difficult years and almost certainly will need guidance on how to be a well-adjusted citizen, not how to build a resume, as she enters adulthood. My hope is that ProFros read this column and realize that coming to college is not going to be easy, wherever they choose to go. Part of growing up is facing failure and difficulty, and there is no shame in asking for help, even if it seems as though everyone else is doing fine. They aren&#39;t.

Our complete inability to cope with the pressures of today may eventually be funny. But for now, it&#39;s definitely too soon to turn the tragedy of our extreme emphasis on academic intelligence and achievement into a quick one-liner glibly delivered at the Manzanita brunch table.